THE DELTA AIRLINES DC-3 THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO MAKE the run to Miami was out of service. So the three passengers scheduled to board in Philadelphia and the lone stewardess, a honey blonde with a wonderful Georgia drawl, were loaded on a Boeing 247D.
Of which my youngest daughter—the ineffable Biddy—said, when shown the picture in her mother’s collection, “You’d have to be crazy to fly in something that tiny.”
Such is the character of the 747 generation.
I’m not sure, however, that she was wrong. The 247D had seen better days, probably before the war; and we were buffeted by ridge after ridge of thunderstorms all day.
I wanted my good, solid, stable Grumman back the worst way. I also wanted to take the aircraft away from the idiot who was flying it, an impulse from which my wife has had to protect me intermittently in the course of our traveling together.
“Buy yourself a Gulfstream, dummy, if you want to play jet pilot,” she tells me.
Note well the kind of woman she is: she says “Gulfstream” not “Learjet.”
There were six intermediate stops between Philadelphia and Miami, of which I can only remember the first and the last—Washington and Jacksonville.
The other Philadelphia passengers were a honeymoon couple who had been married on Saturday—no other explanation for their lofty self-preoccupation was possible. So I had the blond Georgian to myself on the hop down to Washington.
Or she had me to herself.
There were two possibilities, I told myself as we bumped over the Washington Monument in downdrafts so strong I was convinced we were going to impale ourselves on it: either there had been a notable increase in the number of friendly young women available in the world during the past three weeks, or Andrea King, née Margaret Mary (Maggie) Ward, had pulled the blinders off my eyes.
Or maybe my dreams about Jean Kelly had poured high octane fuel on my already ignited lusts.
Drenched my bloodstream with more hormones, I’d say now. My virtue was strengthened, though not greatly, by the fact that in addition to listening to the Phillies on the radio the day before, I had taken in Meet the Press, The NBC Symphony, and The University of Chicago Round Table. On the first, a dullard named Joe Martin attacked Harry Truman for the “price-control mess,” on the second, Toscanini conducted the Shostakovich Fifth; and on the last-named, two ponderous idiots talked about what GIs wanted out of education (a degree, but they didn’t seem to realize it).
I didn’t normally listen to symphonic music, but Maggie, as I was now thinking of Andrea, liked it. So …
They didn’t have the ingenious custom of the mile-high-club then, the 247 could not make it to five thousand feet to save our lives, and there was not enough room in the single-toilet facility crunched into the back of the 247 even for the specified functions (at my height or any height more than that of a midget). But there wasn’t much question about the Georgian’s intentions.
It was flattering, especially when she gave short shrift to the other travelers who embarked and disembarked after we had jumped over the various puddles between Pennsylvania and Florida. As the nuns at Dom’s would have undoubtedly said, the war caused a great increase in immorality. And, to quote Jean Kelly, you know what they mean by that. It was my impression, and still is, that immorality in that sense of the word has never been unpopular.
But, you will be happy to hear, I persisted in virtue.
She was, after all, a Protestant, albeit, she claimed, an Irish one.
And I was no longer Quixote, but Galahad on the quest.
The civilian airport adjoined the Naval Air Station at Jacksonville. I fidgeted nervously in my seat at the sight of the Phantoms and a newer jet, which I assumed was the Panther, on the tarmac. As we chugged up to the Quonset hut terminal, a flight of three Phantoms raced down the runway, stuck their noses firmly in the sky, and soared away, leaving their roar trailing behind.
For a moment I regretted my perfectly sensible decision to leave the Navy before I was hooked on jets.
You haven’t left flying, I told myself, you’ve just left the Navy.
“Shore do make a heap of noise, don’t they?” my blond friend observed.
That comment on the grace of the Phantoms scaling heaven confirmed my virtue.
I thought of the three students in my class who washed out, permanently, while we were in nearby Pensacola. Two of them collided shortly after takeoff—steering-control malfunction on one of the planes—and the other simply disappeared over the ocean.
Like Maggie’s father, he never came back.
I was able to ponder their deaths with more objectivity than ever before. Maybe I was growing up, or maybe only becoming insensitive.
The commander of the NAS had been my captain on the Enterprise at the end of the war. When I was finished in Fort Lauderdale, perhaps I could come back here, pay my respects, and hitch a flight to …
To where?
Well, I could decide that later.
I evaded the persistent Georgian at Miami Airport, a small art deco (as we could call it now) terminal on the edge of the murky Everglades, and took a cab to the Waldorf Towers, an elegant hotel on the beach at Ninth Street (also art deco), where our family used to escape at Easter time. It has long since disappeared, to be replaced by one of the monsters of the late fifties, which in their turn are surviving now only on the courtesy of British excursion tours. Florida has become for the English what it was for us till the jets transformed the world: a haven of sun and warmth in the middle of winter (with no guarantees underwriting either sun or warmth).
When my kids ask what a 1920s Florida resort hotel was like, I tell them that it looked much like Al Capone’s Florida home, which was celebrated earlier this year when WGN did the national con game about the walled-up chambers beneath the Lexington Hotel in Chicago.
It was paradise that oppressively hot day in August of 1946. Like the Arizona Inn, it had, thanks be to God, air-conditioning. (Noisy window units, but who cared?) I was weary from the flight and mildly sick from the day-long bumping in the thunderstorms. I turned on the air conditioner in my room and despite its noise promptly fell asleep. Ten hours later, when I woke up, I could not remember any dreams about blond Georgians or black Irish Pennsylvanians.
Which didn’t mean that I didn’t have any such dreams.
I ate a huge breakfast, swam in the ocean, and walked the beach, where I noted that the shorts-and-halter style affected by Jean Kelly was popular this summer. I applauded it and wondered whether it would be considered too immodest for Lake Geneva. I was pretty sure it would be.
Bikinis they were not. The shorts would be laughed off the beach today because they hid more thigh than they displayed. The suits were the equivalent of heavy girdles and bras legitimated for beach wear, graceless and ugly. But they did reveal a little bit more belly and breast than the one-piece suits. They seemed to invite you (if you were young and horny) to take the wearer in your arms and kiss her respectfully but persistently. For that time, they were perfectly delightful.
My eyes feasted on these lovely bodies and my imagination respectfully (more or less) undressed the most promising of them, including the occasional well-shaped mother in her thirties strolling the beach with a kid or two in tow.
Even fictionally naked, none of them compared with Maggie Ward.
I was reluctant to dress in my most conservative shirt and tie and be about my day’s work. It would be much more pleasant to woman-watch on the beach. (I would have said girl-watch in those pre-feminist days, though the change of the name does not alter the pleasant nature of the activity.)
However, I turned in my laundry, ate an orange, and found a taxi driver who was prepared to drive me up to Fort Lauderdale.
In those days it was but a small suburb of Miami, hardly the place were the boys would be fifteen years later and then indefinitely thereafter at Easter. It was also so hot that Arizona seemed in comparison to be no worse than purgatory.
Quinn’s Meat Market was beyond Fort Lauderdale off the road to Pompano Beach, on a side street halfway between the beach and the Inland Waterway. It was as shabby as the row house in Philadelphia, the most depressing store in a line of dismal shops on the first floor of a decrepit low-slung stucco two-story building, whose white paint, where it had not chipped off, had turned a kind of shoddy gray.
“Not much,” the cabby observed, doubtless wondering what someone who stayed at the most discreet of the Miami Beach hotels was doing in this backwater dump.
“Hardly anything at all,” I agreed, bounding out of the car as if, despite my sweat-soaked shirt, I were a competent and zealous government agent.
I was also furiously angry, more angry at the Quinns than I was at the Japanese whom I had fought during the war. They had not done anything to me, but they had hurt my poor Maggie Ward.
The Quinns, standing together behind the counter as if united in fierce resistance to a hostile world, looked like an Irish caricature of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, at the same time ridiculous and pathetically comic. Tall, skinny, rigid, bespectacled, he in a vest with a butcher’s apron, she, astonishingly in the heat, in a dark-gray sweater, they watched my approach to the counter with a mixture of greed and fear. I was either a sucker to be taken or an enemy to be detested.
Ducks in a shooting gallery, more to be pitied than to be blamed, I thought. Then I remembered a vivacious little girl committed to the care of these monsters, who must have come into the world elderly.
“Do you want to buy something, sir?” he said obsequiously, hand on the butcher knife, which may have been the one that Maggie had used to threaten him.
Gutsy little tiger.
“Not especially.” I leaned casually against the counter, glanced at the dreary chops in the display case and wondered if this part of Florida had no laws regulating the sale of meat.
“Well, what do you want?” she said in a dry, high-pitched voice.
“To talk a little,” I replied, opening my wallet and flashing my officer’s club ID card, which looked official enough to get me into Fort Knox. “About a number of things.” I flipped the wallet shut and jammed it back in my pocket. “Black-market meat for one thing. Stealing from your niece’s estate for another.”
Bull’s-eye. Direct hit. Target in flames and sinking.
“You’re talking nonsense,” he blustered, but all the starch went out of both their spines.
“Has that man finally come back to claim his sluttish daughter?” she sneered.
The shop smelled of an unhealthy mixture of Lysol and rotten meat. Even the sawdust on the floor looked old.
“I’ll ask the questions,” I sneered back.
I hadn’t thought about the possibility that they might fear not only the FBI but Maggie’s long-absent father.
“We didn’t do anything wrong.” He was surely the weaker of the two. “It costs money to raise a child—clothes, tuition, books. We sent her to a Catholic school.”
“As a charity case,” I fired in the dark again and again hit the target. “And then kept the money for school expenses. Don’t try to fool me. We know everything.”
“You won’t be able to prove it in court,” Isobel Phalen Quinn screeched. “You don’t have any evidence.”
I ignored her. “We know that you used to beat her with a belt, the one you’re wearing, as a matter of fact; that you made sexual advances to her until she threatened to emasculate you with that butcher knife you’re holding—”
“This is a carving knife.” Hand and knife quaking, he tried to cut me off.
“Don’t interrupt,” I shouted. “We have enough to put both of you in federal prisons for the rest of your miserable lives.”
“Shut up, you fool,” she shouted. “Don’t tell him a thing.”
“What would a jury think”—I turned my anger on her—”of a woman who forced her sister’s only child to marry a brute who had raped her, so that she could get rid of the child and have the child’s money all to herself?”
They probably were misers, with lots of money, most of it Maggie’s, socked away in War Bonds.
“It’s not true.”
“Ah, but it is,” I proclaimed triumphantly. “All of it, and a lot more besides.”
“What do you want to know?” Howard Quinn sighed in resignation. “We’re simple, hardworking people. We don’t have the money for lawyers.”
“With all that money in government bonds? Don’t try to kid me.”
“What do you want to know?” Isobel was hysterical now.
“To begin with, where is she?”
I’d shot par for the first seven holes. I think, I told myself, you bogeyed that one.
“We don’t know,” they replied together, relaxing.
“She was always an ungrateful little chit,” the woman continued. “After all we did for her, she never wrote us. We had to learn from our neighbors when her baby was born.”
I teed up again. “The child to whom the inheritance should rightfully belong.”
A chip shot away from the green.
“It’s not much money, and with the way prices are going up”—the carving knife slipped out of his wet palm—”it won’t be worth anything at all.”
“You know full well that the little girl died. The question is whether you are responsible for her death.”
“NO!” they bellowed together.
“We might have made some mistakes with the money”—he was melting into cheap lard—”we always tried to be fair, but we’re not murderers.”
Probably not. That would take more courage than they possessed.
“The father is dead, too.”
“The United States Government is well aware of that fact, ma’am,” I sneered. In truth, the government was not sure that he had ever existed, though his records were doubtless somewhere in a file in the “temporary” Navy Department buildings on the Mall in Washington. “We also know how he died.”
That was hardly the truth.
“We don’t know anything about it,” her husband pleaded. “We don’t even know how he died.”
“Come now,” I blustered toward a putt that would mean another par. “You don’t mean to tell me that you raised the girl for eleven years and don’t know the circumstances of her husband’s death? You can’t expect the government of the United States to believe that, can you?”
I missed the putt.
“She hated us because we tried to raise her to be a decent, God-fearing young woman,” Isobel whined. “And she disgraced us and forced us to leave the community where we’d spent most of our lives.”
“Really, Mrs. Quinn.” This was an easy par-three hole. “We both know better than that. If it had not been for some lingering goodwill toward Margaret Mary’s father’s family, you would not have been permitted by the Philadelphia police to slip out of town before the FBI arrested you.”
Okay, I won the hole, but I wasn’t going to win the match.
“We don’t know where she is.” He was sobbing. “If we did, we’d tell you.”
I was sure he would.
“We’ll see about that.” I sneered again, hoping I looked like Paul Muni playing Al Capone. “We’ll be watching your every move. And you’d better spend some of that money of yours on a lawyer.”
I swaggered out of the store, breathing with relief the steamy salt air of the Atlantic Ocean.
I had beaten them into the ground, avenged myself a little on them, and felt rotten.
Ducks, indeed, in a shooting gallery.
And I had not eased any of Margaret Mary Ward’s pain. Only God, should He really be, could do that.
And Maggie, my Maggie, was quite incapable of vengeance. She would have been furious at me.
I had learned that her childhood after her father’s vanishing act had been even worse than I could imagine. So I had more respect for her gumption, for what I would call today her integrity.
There had to have been a gumption gene somewhere in the Ward past. Maggie had inherited it in all its purity and power.
Fine, it was nice to know that, though I could have surmised it without a flight to Fort Lauderdale.
But they didn’t know where she was and neither did I.
I had expected such a result of my pilgrimage to the Quinns’ meat market. Yet I was angry at myself, at the Quinns, at the world, and at whatever powers were responsible for the world, when I found that my expectations were confirmed.
I was not angry, though perhaps I ought to have been, at Andrea/Maggie for slipping away from me in the early morning hours in the Superstition Mountains and starting me on this dizzy, crooked pilgrimage. I would be angry at her later, but it didn’t help.
“Any luck?” the cabby asked as I slammed the door of his 1937 Ford.
“What I didn’t think I’d find out, I didn’t find out.”
I failed to add that I had no idea what came next.
Back at our family’s favorite Florida hotel, I stripped off my soggy clothes, pulled on my swimming trunks, and swam at least a mile in the Atlantic, venturing out much farther than I should have because of my frustration and anger.
I read the papers—H. G. Wells had died, the Paris Peace Conference was fading, ships filled with Jews were running the British blockade into Palestine, and the Cubs had split a doubleheader on Monday—and tried to figure out what to do next.
I was at a dead end. As I had expected I would be. There was nothing more to be learned about Andrea/Maggie from those who had known her as a little girl and then as an emergent young woman in Saint Dominic’s parish in Philadelphia.
I liked this Maggie Ward person, but I still had no idea where she was or where I should look next.
I phoned Delta Airlines and made a reservation for the flight the next morning to Jacksonville.
The admiral would bend regulations and put me on a plane to anywhere in the world that I wanted to go.
Fine. Where did I want to go?
Home to La Mancha? There surely would be a flight to Glenview.
No, not yet. There was still a month before law school began at De Paul or Loyola—if the latter was going to reopen now that the war was over.
I phoned home while I was pondering the problem.
Dad answered the phone. I told him I was in Miami.
“Are you really looking for a girl?” he asked, not so much upset as astonished.
“Trying to solve a puzzle.”
“Where did the puzzle start?” he asked lightly.
“I suppose you could say”—I hesitated; the puzzle really was the death of Maggie’s daughter and husband—”San Diego.”
“Then what are you doing in Miami?” he asked, his voice patient as it always was when he felt his children were being thickheaded.
“I’m leaving for there tomorrow,” I said. “Probably on a navy flight out of Jacksonville. I had to clear up some details first.”
“We have a good contact or two in San Diego if you need it.”
He meant political clout. That’s what “contact” always means in our family vocabulary.
“Thanks. I may need it.”
Amazing how much smarter Dad had become since I’d left for the service.
“San Diego,” I wrote in my journal. “Where I probably should have started.”
I thought about that.
“And I have no idea where I’m going to start when I get there.”